


Alien Drift

by MartyrFan



Category: Civilization (Video Games), Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Far Future, Gen, Hive Mind, Truth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2016-05-23
Packaged: 2018-06-10 08:12:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6947017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MartyrFan/pseuds/MartyrFan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if there was more to the Kaiju and their Masters? What if Gottlieb and Newton found this information and then forgot it simply because it was too much? What if the Kaiju weren't from another dimension, but just Beyond Earth? The Masters and Humanity have more in common than we originally thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alien Drift

**Author's Note:**

> I got the idea for this from a thing on the Internet. It was a basic description of the Harmony affinity. The writer described the Xeno Titans as "Kaiju," and one time when I was thinking about Pacific Rim, I realized the possible fanfic with that connection. When I told a floormate and fellow Civ fan my idea, he later came to me and told me about the Hybrid affinities available through the Rising Tide. After receiving Rising Tide and doing research on it and Pacific Rim, I was ready to write this fanfic. Without further to do, please enjoy this one-of-a-kind fic, "Alien Drift."

**Alien Drift**

Hermann Gottlieb had to admit to himself that while he now understood Newton's liking for heavy metal, he would never in a hundred years enjoy that genre. He glared down at the iPod full of Newton's favorite songs and sighed before placing it back on the man's desk. There was nothing weirder than having someone turn from your least-favorite-person-in-the-world to somewhat-good friend, especially when the change took place overnight thanks to the Drift.

It had been a week since the Breach had been destroyed. The celebration at the Shatterdome had spread across the world when the news had gotten out. All over the globe, people rejoiced that the biggest threat of their time was no more. There were moments of silence for those whose lives had been lost in Hong Kong harbor and at the Breach, but the wild parties and celebrations were soon resumed. The Breach was closed! The Kaiju had been stopped! For the first time in twelve years, the world was truly safe.

It was only after waking up the next morning with a bellyache (Newton had been so hung over that he couldn't get out of his bed), that Gottlieb realized just what the defeat of the Kaiju meant for him personally: Unemployment. With the kaiju defeated and their "Masters" dead into the bargain, there was really no reason for scientists to study them or the Breach. They had all gone into this knowing that that had been the goal; close the breach to stop Kaiju incursions.

Unless another Breach opened and more Kaiju came to Earth.

Raleigh and Mako, who were now engaged as of a yesterday (quite a few of the male-female Jaeger pilot-pairs wound up married) were arguing alongside Marshall Hercules Hansen against the UN directors' plans to dismantle the Jaeger program. The idea that they had only destroyed a military base in the Kaiju universe was certainly a valid one. One thing Gottlieb needed to do was to calculate the odds of the Masters making a comeback with even more Kaiju. The idea of that happening with no available Jaegers around to stop the invasion was terrifying. If Raleigh and Mako's arguments didn't sway the Security Council, the worldwide protests against liquidating the Pan Pacific Defense Corps would.

There was also the Kaiju Cults. Gottlieb had always referred to Newton as a "Kaiju groupie", but these maniacs were on another level entirely. Newton had his tattoos and though he had (once had) a desire to see a Kaiju up close and personal (Otachi's tongue in his face had proved too up close and personal), he didn't believe that the Kaiju were sent by the gods or God to punish mankind. Anyone who worshipped monsters capable of destroying cities and wiping out humanity had something wrong with them. Quite a few of them recanted their beliefs when the Breach was closed, but the most radical Cultists pledged to destroy the Corps and reopen the Breach.

Gottlieb shook his head at the thought of them reopening the Breach. 'Chance of getting stepped on or eaten when your "servant of the gods" emerges from the new Breach: 99.99%. Don't even need a pencil and paper for that.'

There was a part of Gottlieb that hoped that it was all over, that another Breach wouldn't open and that the Masters would stay in their own universe. He and his wife, Vanessa, were expecting their first child in April, a few months from now. He had seen horrible things in the aftermath of Kaiju-Jaeger battles and he didn't want any child of his to witness similar tragedies or to live in fear of the Kaiju. To raise a child in a world where they could be stepped on by a giant inter-dimensional monster or by one of the Jaegers made to fight them, where humanity's extinction was a possibility; that was something that Gottlieb wasn't sure he could do.

While he waited for the debates between the UN and Marshall Hansen (who was incredibly sore at the UN for abandoning the Jaeger program) to end, Gottlieb occupied himself with either calculating how many Kaiju would appear initially out of a second Breach or calling Vanessa and discussing what time he would be able to come home for the baby shower. He didn't want to attend it personally. Some of Vanessa's friends were just downright annoying, and very few men really wanted to attend a baby shower. He just wanted to be in the same city and country as his lovely, pregnant wife.

'Of course, Newton will want to come along to see "Hermann, Jr." I've told him repeatedly we're not naming my child after me or him. "Newton Geiszler Gottlieb." That's not happening, not in a million years. Unless Vanessa likes it, which I doubt she will. I'd better make sure to phone ahead and warn her to call him by his first name.'

It was well-known in the Hong Kong Shatterdome that besides having the maturity of a twelve-year-old, Doctor Newton Geiszler was one of the most informal people on the planet. He asked that people call him Newton or Newt in place of "Geiszler," "Doctor," or "Dr. Geiszler." Gottlieb had earned his Doctorate, he had every intention of people using it. He only liked close friends and family to use his first name. And even though he and Newton understood each other much better since Drifting with the baby Kaiju, he wouldn't call him an especially good friend just yet.

They were still too different, despite apparently being Drift compatible. And besides, they had only Drifted once and he had no intention of repeating the experience. Vomiting in a toilet somehow left standing in the ruins made by Otachi's tale hadn't left a favorable impression on him concerning Drifting.

He just hoped that there'd be no "Ghost-Drifting." It sometimes happened that the partners in Drifting would experience each other's thoughts and emotions, without being connected to a Pons system. No one was sure how it worked, but those who experienced it were also able to predict the actions of their Drift partner with startlingly high accuracy.

He knew Newt pretty well by now without that, thank you very much. Spending four, nearly five years with the man allowed him to get to know Newt. Sharing a workroom with your direct opposite made you focus on all the little details that you disliked about them, thus you learned more about them than about someone you liked. That was probably the leading factor in their Drift compatibility.

Gottlieb tore himself from his thoughts and turned back to what he had been doing before picking up Newt's iPod. He had been trying to clean up his and Newt's workspace. It was full of clutter, some of it from before the Breach was closed, most from the aftermath of the victory party. Unsurprisingly, it was Newton's side of the room that was the worst. Tools and pans for dissecting Kaiju specimens, candy wrappers, giant monster movies and manga, and the occasional "Kaiju groupie" paraphernalia. It was almost nauseating.

"How he manages to work in this—ow! In this pigsty is beyond me." Gottlieb glared at the offending part of the jury-rigged neural bridge that Newton had created for Human-Kaiju Drifting. He wrapped his bleeding finger in a handkerchief and decided to let Newton take his own piece of junk apart. "He's resourceful, I'll give him that."

He turned his attention to some papers that were cluttering his own work space. Old math cheat sheets, scribbled calculations, a few papers on Breach physics; he had really let his desk go in the weeks leading up to the Double Event. Unlike Newton, he had two really good excuses for his mess: Massive calculations to work through and the stress of a having a wife and unborn on the eve of a Kaiju Apocalypse.

Gottlieb had just finished organizing and filing some Laplace transforms of inverse trig functions when he spotted some new papers that hadn't been on his desk before their victory. Frowning, he picked them up and studied them. They were readouts of sensory data taken from a Jaeger, specifically the Gipsy Danger.

'Ah, I remember now. There were special sensors put on the Jaegers for when they went to the Breach to close it. Since they failed, the sensors were shut off. The techs must have forgotten to turn off the ones on Gipsy and LOCCENT must have picked up the feed during the Triple Event.'

Excitedly, Gottlieb studied the readouts. The Gipsy Danger had been in the Breach and on the other side before Raleigh had turned the Jaeger into a makeshift nuclear bomb. They had managed to communicate with them through the Breach, which meant that the readouts he was holding in his hand held information about the Anteverse itself. He was the first scientist to behold data about the world of the Kaiju and their Masters, the secrets of a world beyond the human imagination.

The atmospheric composition was very interesting. It consisted mainly of carbon dioxide, ammonia (not surprising), methane gas, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur dioxide. The Kaiju must have been made to adapt their lungs to the Earth's alien (to them) atmosphere. Once the Masters had wiped out humanity, they'd probably finish the job of altering Earth's atmosphere to suit their needs.

Gottlieb couldn't help but think that the Masters' homeworld, if they had planets in their universe, sounded very much like a young planet, still in the stage of large meteor strikes and volcanic activity. The latter would definitely explain the high sulfur content in their air. What puzzled him was that their sounded relatively young as compared to the Earth. Why would they want to colonize Earth if their planet was still in its infancy?

'Perhaps their world faces destruction from a threat that not even they can hold back. Or maybe they've managed to drain their own resources. Or they're just a bunch of interdimensional monsters incapable of leaving another species alone.'

It was odd; both he and Newton could remember that there was something bigger behind the Kaiju invasion, a history, a backstory, an explanation. But no sooner had their Drift with the baby Otachi ended, the only information they retained was that which concerned the Breach. There was a larger story behind the Kaiju and their Masters. A part of Gottlieb's brain that warned him that he didn't want to remember, that what he had learned while in the Drift was so horrible, it was almost Lovecraftian in nature.

Gottlieb turned his attention to the atomic analysis of the Anteverse. On a molecular level, their world was practically identical to Earth's. Electrons, proton, neutrons, and all the obscure particles that one would hear about in college lecture on theoretical physics were present on the other side of the Breach.

Only, there was some sort of anomaly around the Breach and especially within it. A new type of particle, one that Gottlieb had never seen before. He studied the analysis on this particle and typed the data into his computer to get an idea of what he was dealing with. This particle has new very strange properties, properties he had never seen before in ordinary matter.

The information on its velocity and it mass were incredibly strange, yet looked familiar to him. He knew he had seen these particles somewhere before, but where? The answer came to him just as his computer finished creating a rendering of the particle. They were tachyon particles, particles of matter that managed to achieve lightspeed. And they were all around the Breach and in it.

Gottlieb's brain reeled in amazement and disbelief. 'It can't be. If those are tachyon particles, then that brings up the possibility, however unlikely, of…of time travel.' And with that thought echoing through the outer limits of his mind, Dr. Hermann Gottlieb remembered everything he had seen in the Kaiju hive-mind. Everything that he and Newt had forgotten the instant the baby Kaiju's neurons stopped firing and the three-way Drift ended. Everything they had forgotten simply because their brilliant minds just couldn't handle the massive intake of information or its implications.

It wasn't just the Kaiju that made up the hive-mind; it was every living thing on the Masters' world. The mind of every living thing in that world was connected together in one gigantic Drift. A huge mental conglomerate of billions of sentient beings and animals, along with one huge mind that held precedence over the others: "The Planet Mind."

As he wondered why it was called that, he remembered why. When the Masters' had first came to their world, they had discovered that it was home to a gigantic intelligence. Their new home was in reality a superorganism, a planet-sized creature which had influence over the animals that populated their new home. This realization caused his mind to lurch at the idea.

It was during a period of intense war and conflict that the Masters' had done it. They had given the Planet Mind true sentience through the construction of an artificial brain, the "Mind Flower." It effectively forced the minds of every living thing into one massive hive-mind; the constructors by their own free will, the rest by the Planet Mind's sheer mental presence. The various factions in the war simply put down their arms and converted to the ideology of the faction that built the Mind Flower.

The wars before the Awakening, as they called it, were over a multitude of issues. The main reason were the Affinities, so much so that the conflict was called the Affinity Wars. The Masters' world was not their original homeworld at all, but a world they saw fit to colonize. There were three main schools of thought, and hybrids of these three, as to how their species should go about colonizing their new home.

Purity was the idea that they should keep the DNA and physiology of their species unaltered, and that the planet should be made into a mirror image of their old one. Supremacy was the belief that they should utilize nanotechnology and cybernetics to make themselves impervious to any hostile environment they might encounter, at the cost of their old nature (That bit made Gottlieb shudder a little. The next thing he learned was far worse.). The Harmony Affinity believed that the only way to truly live on their new and avoid the mistakes that drove them there was to take the DNA of the local fauna and use genetic modification to adapt themselves to the alien environ ments.

The Hybrid affinities represented the middle grounds between each of the affinities. It was one of these that had built the "Mind Flower," the device through which the Awakening was realized. The Harmony-Supremacy Affinity was the belief that the human race should be altered by any method necessary in order to survive. They used alien DNA to alter their bodies to match the environment, and then turned to cybernetics where genetics fell short.

Believing that their species' homeworld needed to be converted to their way of thinking and existence, the "Collective" built a massive wormhole projector which they called an "Emancipation Gate." They honestly believed that by invading and taking over the "mother world," they would be doing their brethren who remained on their original world a favor, "freeing" them in both mind and body from the constraints of their organic, illogical, chaotic existence.

When they turned on the Gate and sent their weapons of war to the other side, they found that their wormhole wasn't as stable as they thought it was. Not only did it bring two points in space together, it also brought two points in time together as well. They were looking at their homeworld a very long time before the rise of any civilization. They recalculated the coordinates of their portal that dealt with time, and decided to invade their homeworld just before the events that would cause their species to seek homes on other planets. They figured that if their timeline, and therefore their own existence, was terminated by "saving" their old home, it would be well worth it.

'This…this can't be!' Gottlieb thought in a panic. 'If they planned to invade their planet of origin, than that means….'

The answers came to him in rushing torrent of amazement and horror. He saw the truth, the awful truth behind the Breach, the Kaiju, the Masters', and the Anteverse. The Masters' old name was "humanity," their homeworld was "Earth", and there was only the universe. They had sent "Xeno Titans," massive creatures created by a fusion of genetic and architectural knowledge to be the ultimate living weapons, animals able to topple cities and crush armies, back in time to prevent the "Great Mistake" and its horrendous aftermath. He saw a mental picture of the Earth trapped in a war which devastated the world and led to environmental, political, economic, and technological decline. A "Second Dark Age", which led to the discovery of the "Inflection Point", and the "Seeding". It was there that Gottlieb's flashback ended.

Trembling violently, Gottlieb collapsed into a nearby chair, the papers from the Gipsy Danger's sensors falling from his hands onto the floor. This was insane. The human race had just fought off an invasion by a colony of theirs that didn't even exist yet? Worse, a colony that had flipped its heritage the bird and proceeded to turn itself into a monstrous hybrid of human DNA, alien DNA, and cybernetic components, put all of the minds on its new home under the thrall of an alien superorganism, and then proceeded to cross the gap between space and time to invade Earth?

Gottlieb felt like he was living an episode of that old American show, The Twilight Zone. He knew it thanks to Newt and some of the other Americans that used to work in K-Science at Hong Kong Shatterdome.

'Wait, shouldn't their timeline have ceased to exist the moment that Trespasser attacked San Francisco? The Butterfly Effect from that attack alone should have been enough to alter the future, and their present, radically.'

Two explanations arose in his mind immediately. The first, and simplest, was that time couldn't be changed and that it was all just a time loop. For all they knew, the Masters' had probably just caused the Great Mistake to happen because of their incursion into the past, forcing humanity to build the gigantic Jaegers and giving them access to the genetic material of their greatest weapons. If the Kaiju never returned, humanity would be sure to turn on itself with the very weapons that it had just used to defend itself. The picture of Jaegers fighting each other in cities amidst the screams of frightened and helpless citizens forced itself into his mind, making him ill. Additionally, the Drifting technology itself could be the predecessor of the Mind Flower.

The second explanation was more reassuring, but not by much. When the Masters' had created the wormhole from their time to 2013, the year the Kaiju War started, they had inadvertently created an alternate reality, one where giant monsters had invaded the world and humanity had fought back as one. Their own history would be unaffected by this alternate history. That meant though, that somewhere in the Multiverse (for one would be needed for alternate realities to exist), there was a world, or a number of worlds, where Hermann Gottlieb was living out his life as he would if the Kaiju had never attacked. The Butterfly Effect would allow for a number of scenarios to happen; he never met and married Vanessa, he never met Newton or anyone in the Corps, he failed his final thesis at his university and never became a doctor, he might even be dead….

He hurriedly shook his head and forced himself back into the present, into the only reality he had ever known. He need to think about this; thinking was one of the things that he was good at.

He couldn't tell anyone about this. He'd wind up in a padded cell for sure, and he had no intention of that happening. He had his future ahead of him and he planned on enjoying it with his wife and newborn child, not in some mental institute because of "work-related stress." Best not to mention this to anyone, especially not to….

Gottlieb jumped out of his chair as a realization dawned on him. "Newton!" he almost yelped. Newt had undergone Kaiju Drifting twice. The possibility of something like these readouts triggering a flashback of his two times as part of an alien hive-mind was higher than his had been. He was also much more imaginative than Gottlieb and as insane as it was, Gottlieb knew from personal experience that Newton could imagine even crazier things. If the spazz remembered, he would blab about it to everyone he could without a second thought of the consequences. His desire for recognition, evidenced by his reckless solo-Drift with the piece of Kaiju brain across the room, would be his downfall.

Gottlieb was struck by another thought: If he didn't say anything, and the Great Mistake happened despite the Masters' efforts, the blood of billions of people and of modern civilization itself would be on his hands. Then again, if this was all a time loop, the Great Mistake would happen no matter what he did to stop it. Some things are just too big for one person to stop.

And if this was an alternate reality from theirs, the future was still up for grabs concerning a gigantic manmade disaster that would finally send mankind packing for the stars. The long-term effects of the Kaiju War had to be calculated; he needed to look at trends from similar events in the past (if there were any), and get an idea of the possibilities for the future of the world they now lived in. If the Mistake was in the works, he needed to be ready.

Gottlieb gathered up the readouts from the Gipsy and started for the trashcan. He was just about to tear the papers up and throw them away when he realized something: He didn't need to tell anyone about the Masters' true origin. He would just tell Marshall Hansen about the tachyon particles and the possibilities that invoked. He would also make sure that he was close to Newt if he had a flashback when he learned about the tachyon particles. Hopefully, he'd be able to head Newton off before he opened his huge mouth and got himself wrapped in a straitjacket.

An alternate, worse scenario could be that someone believed their story and caused a huge panic. What would people do if they learned a future Human colony had sent those monsters back through time and space in order to prevent a disaster that nearly destroyed the world? An idealist might answer that Humanity would pledge to keep the Great Mistake from happening at all. A realist, and Gottlieb was very much a realist, knew that people would go after all research into space travel to prevent the formation of such a colony. They might even come after the Jaeger program to destroy Drifting technology. No, it was best that nobody knew the truth.

Gottlieb quietly folded the papers and put them into his coat pocket before turning back to his desk. He began to organize the copious amount of papers that remained, seeking refuge from the terrible knowledge that filled his mind. A secret so bizarre, it made the Kaiju appear as normal and as common as pigeons. This was something he would keep until the grave itself claimed him.

When Newt came down to their workspace and proceeded to blast heavy metal out of a stereo just for kicks, he was surprised that the only response he got from Gottlieb was a quick glare before he went back to his papers. Newt figured the man must have a lot on his mind to not do anything about the music.

**THE END**

**Author's Note:**

> And there you have it folks, the truth behind the Kaiju, the Breach, and their creators. Please let me know what you thought of this fic in a review or PM me. 
> 
> I hope you all enjoyed this strange crossover. Happy writing everyone!


End file.
